Oysterland: A Journey to the Heart of Bivalve Country

ysters have once again become the bivalve of the hour, the defining protein of the age, expressing everything we want life and food to be right now. Luxurious but unpretentious, decadent but healthful, oysters are the must-order—from the basis of le grand plateau de fruits de mer at a New York institution like Balthazar to seafood-centric newbies like The Ordinary in Charleston, South Carolina. Oysters are even quasi-wild and sustainable, not to mention downright good for the oceans. There’s something sweetly deceptive about their simplicity, too. At least it felt that way to me, sitting at grand old Elliott’s Oyster House on Seattle’s waterfront.

The two dozen trays behind the shucker were flagged with names like Hama Hama, Barron Point, Little Skookum—farms within a few hours’ drive (or sail) of my barstool. With the precision of a surgeon, the oysterman set to work and laid my order on ice, next to a cold glass of Washington Sauvignon Blanc. Those shimmering half shells seemed to say that they’d been plucked straight from the sea, as if there were nothing to know beyond their briny lusciousness. And yet, as with peas and pork and broccoli and beef, there is always a story to tell when you follow your food back to the source.

The wonderful thing about Seattle, that greatest of oyster cities, is that the story began just beyond Elliott’s big picture windows, among the sheltered inlets and forested islands that make Washington State’s $185-million-a-year shellfish industry easily the biggest and best in the United States, if not the world.

I came here to spend three days driving a loop we’ll call the Puget Sound Oyster Trail. Think of it as a network of coastal roads and ferry routes linking oyster shacks, shellfish farms, and low-key spots offering enough raw oysters on the half shell, crispy fried oysters, and butter-dripping baked bivalves to complete a gastronomic road trip as legit as any Napa Valley wine tour or Texas Hill Country BBQ quest.

My first stop, Jones Family Farms on Lopez Island, was the ideal place to witness the life cycle of the commercial oyster in miniature. To get there, I took I-5 north from Seattle, then followed Chuckanut Drive to the coast. I lunched at the tidy Oyster Creek Inn, where the menu reads like an oyster cookbook: raw, pan-fried, baked, and, my choice, an impressively refined stew with local oysters poached in a silky white-wine-and-cream broth aromatic with garlic, shallots, and tarragon.

Later, on the bow of a car ferry departing Anacortes, I stood in the sunset breeze watching eagles soar above as low-lying Lopez Island grew closer. I arrived at the Jones’s beautiful family farmhouse in time for a dinner of raw half shells, oyster chowder with white wine, and pork roast from a hog raised on the property.

The following morning, Nick Jones, a lanky and bespectacled 36-year-old, took me to the rocky bay where he farms his oysters. He explained that two species dominate the American market: Crassotrea virginicas, a.k.a. Easterns, native to the Atlantic coast but farmed on both coasts and the source of more than half of all oysters sold in the U.S.; and Crassotrea gigas, a.k.a. Pacifics, native to Japan but now the gold standard in American West Coast shellfish farming. Three more species occupy specialty niches in the U.S.: tiny Olympias, once endemic on the West Coast from San Diego to Alaska but now scarce; European Flats, the coppery-tasting French Belon oysters beloved by Hemingway and farmed on both coasts; and Kumamotos, the petite Japanese oysters prized for their mild, buttery flavor. Five oyster species are farmed in the U.S. That’s all.

A handful of oyster farms still have the clean, shallow, brackish waters required for local species to spawn wild without human help, accounting for about 5 percent of all market oysters. But the vast majority of American growers buy seed from one of dozens of hatcheries on both coasts. Some are tiny, like the hatchery Jones operates out of an old shipping container, and some are much bigger, like Bay Shellfish Company in Florida.

All hatchery workers start the process like Jones does, bringing male and female oysters together in tanks, under conditions that induce them to spawn, and then nursing millions, or even billions, of larvae to a viable size that set to become “seed.” That seed—microscopic but adult-looking oysters—gets shipped to farmers who raise and brand it either with a geographical designation like Bluepoint or Wellfleet, or with a farm-specific trade name like Sweetwater, from California’s Hog Island Oyster Company.

Scenes from the Puget Sound Oyster Trail

Farmers plant this seed in their own waters and then mostly leave it alone, allowing it to feed on natural phytoplankton. Most of the oyster half shells that we slurp down with cold Sancerre—or iced vodka shots, as the case may be—were harvested between one and two years of age, having acquired a taste and texture unique to where they matured. This is the so-called merroir effect, analogous to terroir in winemaking: Local maritime conditions, including salinity, local phytoplankton species, and tidal flow, give oysters from each and every farm and region a distinctive character. After all, East Coast oysters like Malpeque (Prince Edward Island), Bluepoint (Connecticut and Long Island, New York), Wellfleet (Massachusetts), Rappahannock (Virginia), and Apalachicola (Florida) are all the same C. virginica species, only raised in different taste-defining locales.

“It’s still pretty much just managed hunting and gathering,” Jones told me, looking over the shallow lagoon where he plants the oyster seed that he keeps for himself. In a tone both befuddled and amused, Jones said he grows 400,000 oysters here annually, on six acres of tideland in Shoal Bay, a puny haul compared to the big players like Taylor Shellfish Farms, which can harvest 600,000 a week, but still an astonishing volume of food to raise in so little space, with so little input. The oysters even filter out enough phytoplankton to bring sunlight deeper into the water column, allowing more plants to grow and thereby improving fish and crab habitat. “It’s a biological wonderland,” he said. To complete the cycle, all that’s left to do is to pick them out of the water, pack them on ice, and drive them to Seattle.

Oyster farming is gritty manual labor. There’s no way around it. Driving across Whidbey Island, past legendary farms like Penn Cove, I saw workers in open boats, managing platoons of pickers bent over the frigid mud at low tide. Even industry superpower Taylor Shellfish Farms—along the Hood Canal, the ancient fjord where they run a state-of-the-art hatchery—looks like a weather-beaten marine lab.

Taylor raises five billion oyster larvae here annually, plus another two billion at a plant on Kona, Hawaii. Company scientists run research and development projects and also license one of the greatest oyster technology advancements: “triploid” oysters, which have three chromosomes instead of the usual two. Normal, “diploid” oysters spawn every summer, causing dramatic and unpleasant changes in flavor. But non-spawning triploids can be harvested year-round with the same sweet flavor profile, which is why that old adage about eating oysters only in months with a letter r just doesn’t hold true for most U.S. oysters anymore.

There was a time, of course—and not so long ago—when oystermen simply waded into the vast, clean tidal flats of great waters like the Long Island Sound and the Chesapeake and San Francisco bays, plucking up millions of wild oysters. The estuary of the lower Hudson River alone once had 350 square miles of wild-spawning C. virginica oyster beds, making preindustrial New York City the greatest oyster-consuming city of all time.

But pollution, landfill, and overharvesting killed New York’s last wild beds by 1927. Out West, oyster-loving Gold Rush prospectors did the same, devouring all the native Olympia oysters first in San Francisco Bay and then clear up the coast to Washington, thanks to schooners that raked coves and then sailed quickly south. Inside Puget Sound, pulp mill pollution killed off almost all of the Olympia oysters until 1957, when the mills closed, local waters rebounded, and the Taylor family added to their tideland holdings.

The Bivalves’ Big Adventure: From Bay to Bar in 48 Hours

Bill Taylor himself—trim and fit and focused, wearing jeans and running shoes—met me at the biggest oyster field of my trip, near the Taylor headquarters in Shelton. We pulled on hip boots and walked onto the mudflats of Oakland Bay. “This was the first place I ever worked, digging clams back in the ’70s,” he said. “I remember it was so polluted we only got a few pounds.” Forty years later, millions of clean oysters and Manila clams hide in the muddy gravel all around us. Picking one up, Taylor rinsed it in a creek and shucked it for me—the perfect snack.

Afterward, at the Taylor processing plant, I saw trucks delivering countless oysters for distribution under Taylor Shellfish’s brand. As we watched men and women in rubber boots at the Taylor processing plant in Quilcene sort those oysters, I repeated something I’d heard from Jones: that oyster sales have exploded so much in the last few years, with big raw bars like New York’s Grand Central selling 1.5 million half shells annually, and even cozy joints like Seattle’s the Walrus and the Carpenter moving 300,000, that every producer in the country could double production and still not meet demand.

Taylor nodded. “Our sales have grown 2,000 percent in 20 years,” he said. “And that’s primarily driven by the raw-oysters-on-the-half-shell market. In the past, we sold 80 percent of our product preshucked, in tubs. Now those numbers are flipped and 80 percent are alive in the shell.”

I’ve certainly done my part—from the oyster bar at my long- ago wedding to the hundreds I’ve shucked at home. I kept up the good work back in Seattle, at the end of my Puget Sound road trip, ordering still more half shells. As I swallowed one oyster after another, I thought about all the beautiful coastline I’d seen, the rubber boots, and the hard work of hauling bivalves from sea to table. I also thought about that oft-repeated Jonathan Swift remark: “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”